The way to have product team members trust each other and get along is to have them sketch together.

Continue Reading: The importance of sketching in product design

Solid piece by Nick Bilton in the New York Times about the trend of flat UI: The Flattening of Design Several thoughts: 1) I’m not convinced that flat UI is a good thing…in my experience it does make UIs seem simpler but often at the expense of visual priority and affordances. Many flat UIs suffer [...]

Continue Reading: To flat or not to flat?

My good friend and colleague Dan Ritzenthaler has written Wireframes: A good communication tool, a poor design tool, an article that captures his insights on a lot of the conversations we’ve had lately at HubSpot. Dan is not dismissive of wireframes, but he doesn’t think they’re a good design tool. Instead, Dan says that wireframes [...]

Continue Reading: Wireframes are dead. Long live wireframes.

A thoughtful post from Allan over at Layervault, Progressive Reduction touches on the issue I brought up in Labels always win last week. Progressive reduction is a design technique in which you reduce interface elements over time as people use the app more. (with usage assuming familiarity). An interesting concept, to be sure. My guess [...]

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In the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win.

Continue Reading: Labels always win.

On a vast majority of UI design projects, the initial user experience is an afterthought. Yet, the first steps a user takes are critical for several reasons. First, the initial experience gets any data loaded or necessary setup done. Second, and perhaps as importantly, the initial experience teaches users how to use the software and [...]

Continue Reading: Designing for mobile empty states

Humans make decisions by comparing options…the better you can help people compare your product with what they’re already using the easier their decision will be (or the more likely they’ll make the right decision). Here’s a good example of a nicely-designed comparison page: Breeze: Compare Breeze with the rest. via @brilliantcrank

Continue Reading: Nice comparison page: Breeze

Good reminder by Clay Allsopp, which amounts to “Don’t judge software by its cover”. “When everything moves toward beautiful, it chips away at our ‘product survival’ instinct and makes it harder for us to tell the gold from the crap.” I’m glad that I’m seeing more and more people make the distinction between visual and [...]

Continue Reading: We’re Better At (Visual) Design, And That’s Not Good

Thoughtful post on UI and Capability by Ryan Singer. Contains several important points, among them: “Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not.” I like this distinction and tend [...]

Continue Reading: UI and Capability

One of the best reads of 2012 is The best interface is no interface by Golden Krishna. Golden makes a call-to-action to actually get rid of UI by designing more elegant interactions. He extols three principles that help build this framework: Eliminate interfaces to embrace natural, everyday processes. Leverage computers instead of catering to them. [...]

Continue Reading: The best interface is no interface